The Pivot of Civilization eBook

(3) Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable
in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing
the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility
of the “unfit” and the feeble-minded establishing
a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering
the birth-rate among the “fit.” But
in its so-called “constructive” aspect,
in seeking to reestablish the dominance of healthy
strain over the unhealthy, by urging an increased
birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer
nothing more farsighted than a “cradle competition”
between the fit and the unfit. They suggest in
very truth, that all intelligent and respectable parents
should take as their example in this grave matter of
child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the
community.

(2) The Problem of
the Feeble-Minded: An Abstract of the
Report of the Royal
Commission on the Cure and Control of
the Feeble-Minded, London:
P. S. King & Son.

(3) Cf. Feeble-Minded
in Ontario: Fourteenth Report for
the year ending October
31st, 1919.

(4) Eugenics Review,
Vol. Xiii, p. 339 et seq.

(5) Dwellers in the
Vale of Siddem: A True Story of the
Social Aspect of Feeble-mindedness.
By A. C. Rogers and
Maud A. Merrill; Boston
(1919).

CHAPTER V: The Cruelty of Charity

“Fostering the good-for-nothing
at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty.
It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for
future generations. There is no greater curse
to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing
population of imbeciles.”

Herbert Spencer

The last century has witnessed the rise and development
of philanthropy and organized charity. Coincident
with the all-conquering power of machinery and capitalistic
control, with the unprecedented growth of great cities
and industrial centers, and the creation of great
proletarian populations, modern civilization has been
confronted, to a degree hitherto unknown in human
history, with the complex problem of sustaining human
life in surroundings and under conditions flagrantly
dysgenic.

The program, as I believe all competent authorities
in contemporary philanthropy and organized charity
would agree, has been altered in aim and purpose.
It was first the outgrowth of humanitarian and altruistic
idealism, perhaps not devoid of a strain of sentimentalism,
of an idealism that was aroused by a desperate picture
of human misery intensified by the industrial revolution.
It has developed in later years into a program not
so much aiming to succor the unfortunate victims of
circumstances, as to effect what we may term social
sanitation. Primarily, it is a program of self-protection.
Contemporary philanthropy, I believe, recognizes that
extreme poverty and overcrowded slums are veritable
breeding-grounds of epidemics, disease, delinquency
and dependency. Its aim, therefore, is to prevent
the individual family from sinking to that abject
condition in which it will become a much heavier burden
upon society.